I have a Dell Inspiron 9300, w/ a 1.6 Ghz Intel Centrino with SpeedStep enabled, running Kubuntu Edgy (with all the latest updates). I just updated my BIOS from A02 to A05 and whenever my CPU fan kicks on, it stays on full tilt until I reboot, regardless of the CPU temperature (which is, at this very moment, at 36 degrees C and still the fan is running on high). I had also just tested Fiesty on my system and had thought maybe it was Fiesty that was causing the fan speed problem, but even after I reverted back to Edgy, the problem continues... so, it must have been the BIOS flash that did it. Does anyone know...

A) A link to Dell Bios A02 so I may revert back, or
B) A way to control the fan speed

- mertle

Try this link:

http://dellfand.dinglisch.net/

Seems to be some kind of daemon to regulate the fan on Dell Notebooks.

I've got an Inspiron 8000 notebook and found this site which has an app to control the fan speed:

http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html

I was running Windows at the time (still am - dual boot XP/FC5) -but at the bottom of the page it has links to other OS'es including some ports of the program to Linux.

Haven't tested either of these under Linux, but might be worth a shot

Thanks for the links, Mortovski.. I actually installed i8kutils the other night, and after reading a reply to this post I made in the Ubuntu forums, got it to work. I found I could use gkrell to configure fan thresholds and such, but I've yet to try dellfand- I may just check it out anyway. Thanks muchly for the reply.

- mertle

Glad ya found the problem. This must be an Ubuntu thing because I've seen a lot of posts about this across several Linux forums from people using Ubuntu. Maybe a bug in a kernel patch?

I'll try to pass along your thread to those asking about it.

I dunno if it's an Ubuntu thing, but it might be a Dell Laptop thing. While looking around for tips on the problem, I've only seen this issue with Dell and Acer, so far. The fan problem was /definitely/ not happening before I flashed my BIOS to the latest version (A05). I actually regret doing it, but I have this insane compulsion to keeping everything up to date up to date. Heh.

- mertle

Hi there - don't know if you've already solved this but I had the same problem on an Inspiron 9400 (running XP though)

Dell released another bios update on 04/11/07 which worked.

By this time I'd already reformatted and reinstalled my OS, and still had the problem so obviously no other nasties responsible. I suspect a BIOS virus was responsible as I hadn't updated my BIOS, the fan problem just started happening a week ago and got worse and worse.

Haven't heard my fan for 24 hours now!

Check back with Dell Support.

Hope this helps